The New Jersey Assembly on Monday barred Gov. Chris Christie from using
a house at Island Beach State Park during government shutdowns.
The Legislature voted 63-2 with two abstentions to prevent Christie —
or any future New Jersey governor — from using the Island Beach State
Park beach mansion during a government shutdown, officials said.
Assemblyman John Wisniewski of Middlesex County proposed the measure
July 13 after Christie earned statewide ire when he was photographed
sunning himself July 2 with his family on the beach after he shut down
state beaches during a budget standoff.
Multiple sources told the Times that President Donald Trump chose to remove Scaramucci at the request of the administration’s new chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly.
Scaramucci’s short tenure was certainly a whirlwind: after giving an expletive-laden interview to the New Yorker about his colleagues, Scaramucci’s wife filed for divorce on Friday.
It is unclear at this time whether Scaramucci is being completely
removed from the White House, or whether he is taking on a different
role in the administration, reports CNN.
This is a developing story, please check back for more information.
A few years ago in New York, Al Pacino starred in a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross,
and the casting was poignant: In 1992, a much younger and more vigorous
Pacino had played the role of hotshot salesman Ricky Roma in the film
adaptation of the play; in the Broadway revival, a 72 year old Pacino
played the broken-down has-been Shelley Levene.
Glengarry Glen Ross is the Macbeth of real estate,
full of great, blistering lines and soliloquies so liberally peppered
with profanity that the original cast had nicknamed the show “Death of a Fucking Salesman.” But a few of those attending the New York revival
left disappointed. For a certain type of young man, the star of Glengarry Glen Ross is
a character called Blake, played in the film by Alec Baldwin. We know
that his name is “Blake” only from the credits; asked his name by one of
the other salesmen, he answers: “What’s my name? Fuck you. That’s my
name.” In the film, Blake sets things in motion by delivering a
motivational speech and announcing a sales competition: “First prize is a
Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize? A set of steak knives. Third prize is,
you’re fired. Get the picture?” He berates the salesmen in terms both
financial — “My watch cost more than your car!” — and sexual. Their
problem, in Blake’s telling, isn’t that they’ve had a run of bad luck or
bad sales leads — or that the real estate they’re trying to sell is
crap — it is that they aren’t real men.
The leads are weak? You’re weak. . . . Your name is “you’re wanting,”
and you can’t play the man’s game. You can’t close them? Then tell your
wife your troubles, because only one thing counts in this world: Get
them to sign on the line which is dotted. Got that, you fucking faggots?
A few young men waiting to see the show had been quoting Blake’s speech
to one another. For them, and for a number of men who imagine themselves
to be hard-hitting competitors (I’ve never met a woman of whom this is
true), Blake’s speech is practically a creed. It’s one of those things
that some guys memorize. But Blake does not appear in the play, the
scene having been written specifically for the film and specifically for
Alec Baldwin, a sop to investors who feared that the film would not be
profitable and wanted an additional jolt of star power to enliven it.
That’s some fine irony: Blake’s paean to salesmanship was written to
satisfy salesmen who did not quite buy David Mamet’s original pitch. The
play is if anything darker and more terrifying without Blake, leaving
the poor feckless salesmen at the mercy of a faceless malevolence
offstage rather than some regular jerk in a BMW. But a few finance bros
went home disappointed that they did not get the chance to sing along,
as it were, with their favorite hymn.
These guys don’t want to see Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. What they want is to beBlake.
They want to swagger, to curse, to insult, and to exercise power over
men, exercising power over men being the classical means to the end of
exercising power over women, which is of course what this, and
nine-tenths of everything else in human affairs, is about. Blake is a
specimen of that famous creature, the “alpha male,” and establishing and
advertising one’s alpha creds is an obsession for some sexually unhappy
contemporary men. There is a whole weird little ecosystem of websites
(some of them very amusing) and pickup-artist manuals offering men tips
on how to be more alpha, more dominant, more commanding, a literature
that performs roughly the same function in the lives of these men that Cosmopolitan
sex tips play in the lives of insecure women. Of course this advice
ends up producing cartoonish, ridiculous behavior. If you’re wondering
where Anthony Scaramucci learned to talk and behave like such a Scaramuccia, ask him how many times he’s seen Glengarry Glen Ross.
What’s notable about the advice offered to young men aspiring to be
“alpha males” is that it is consistent with the classic salesmanship
advice offered by the real-world versions of Blake in a hundred thousand
business-inspiration books (Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World is
the classic of the genre) and self-help tomes, summarized in an old
Alcoholics Anonymous slogan: “Fake it ’til you make it.” For the pick-up
artists, the idea is that simply acting in social situations as though
one were confident, successful, and naturally masterful is a pretty good
substitute for being those things. Never mind the advice of Cicero (esse quam videri, be rather than seem) or Rush — just go around acting like Blake and people will treat you like Blake.
If that sounds preposterous, remind yourself who the president of the United States of America is.
Trump is the political version of a pickup artist, and Republicans — and
America — went to bed with him convinced that he was something other
than what he is. Trump inherited his fortune but describes himself as
though he were a self-made man.
We did not elect Donald Trump; we elected the character he plays on television.
He wants to be John Wayne, but what he is is “Woody Allen without the humor.”
Peggy Noonan, to whom we owe that observation, has his number: He is
soft, weak, whimpering, and petulant. He isn’t smart enough to do the
job and isn’t man enough to own up to the fact. For all his gold-plated
toilets, he is at heart that middling junior salesman watching Glengarry Glen Ross
and thinking to himself: “That’s the man I want to be.” How many times
do you imagine he has stood in front of a mirror trying to project like
Alec Baldwin? Unfortunately for the president, it’s Baldwin who does the
good imitation of Trump, not the other way around.
Hence the cartoon tough-guy act. Scaramucci’s star didn’t fade when he
gave that batty and profane interview in which he reimagined Steve
Bannon as a kind of autoerotic yogi. That’s Scaramucci’s best
impersonation of the sort of man the president of these United States,
God help us, aspires to be.
But he isn’t that guy. He isn’t Blake. He’s poor sad old Shelley Levene,
who cannot close the deal, who spends his nights whining about the
unfairness of it all.
So, listen up, Team Trump: “Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.”
People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s Republican Party and organized crime,
and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many
scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing
tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up
the destruction of our environment and public lands.
History
suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he
holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact.
And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to
get and stay in office.
In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.
Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.
And
every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have
been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not
through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and
treason.
(And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is
arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within
the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)
Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.
In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.
But
Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish
Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the
1968 election.
So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to
talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an
upcoming peace talk in Paris.
Nixon promised South
Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when
he was President than LBJ could give them then.
LBJ
found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3
days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader
Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: Some
of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the
Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese]
president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get
a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to
get this in the campaign.
And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those
tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and
that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.
South
Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won
the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands
of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians,
died as a result of Nixon’s treason.
And Nixon was never held to account for it.
Gerald Ford was the next Republican.
After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.
Ford
was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP
Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and
thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard
Nixon’s treason.
The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.
He
won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his
people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release
American hostages in Iran.
According to Iran’s
then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held
off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election -
then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.
In
1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian
President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two
hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
"I
openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I
won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates
also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of
votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it
[hostage-taking]."
Carter was confident that with
Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had
been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of
1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980
Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to
win an election.
Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with
the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980
Presidential election.
This was nothing short of
treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the
so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts
to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
After
arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left
Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and
Reaganism.
Ayatollah Khomeini
and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known
as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and
then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US
presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released
tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.
And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.
The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.
And
the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by
way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran
were released.
And for that, Reagan began selling the
Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was
busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.
But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.
After
Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was
really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.
If
the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet
Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four
illegitimate Republican presidents.
And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.
In the Bush v. Gore
Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and
thus handed George W. Bush the presidency - Justice Antonin Scalia wrote
in his opinion:
"The counting of votes ... does in my
view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to
the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the
legitimacy of his election."
Apparently, denying the
presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in
Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.
And
apparently it wasn't important that Scalia’s son worked for the law
firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no
Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn't important to
mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush
transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would
serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in
Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
And
more than a year after the election - a consortium of newspapers
including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did
their own recount in Florida - manually counting every vote in a process
that took almost a year - and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the
presidency in 2000.
“If
all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards
and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore
would have won.”
That little bit of info was slipped
into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it
would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.
Why?
because the 9/11 attacks had just happened - and journalists feared
that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush
actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already
in crisis.
And none of that even considered that Bush
could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother,
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine
Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.
So
for the third time in 4 decades - Republicans took the White House
under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.
And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.
Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck
to purge millions of legitimate voters – most people of color – from
the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.
Millions
of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote
because they didn’t own the requisite ID – a modern-day poll-tax that’s
spread across every Republican state with any consequential black,
elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to
have a passport or drivers’ license).
Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.
You
can only wonder how much better off America would be if 6 Republican
Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.
In fact - the last legitimate Republican President - Dwight Eisenhower - was unlike any other Republican president since.
He ran for the White House on a platform of peace - that he would end the Korean War.
This from one of his TV campaign ads:
“The
nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower.
Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe
leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the
number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for
Eisenhower.”
Ike
was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people - who kept
tax rates on the rich at 91 percent - and made sure that the middle
class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.
As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:
"Should
any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment
insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not
hear of that party again in our political history."
And
Eisenhower was right - the only way Republicans have been able to win
the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright
treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme
Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate
president.
And that's where we are today, dealing with
the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate
Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal
judiciary.
And this doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer
Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past
decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of
Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.
This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.
They
work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and
billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and “conservative”
TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded
network of right wing websites.
The Koch Network’s
various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more
staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and
twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?
Whether
it’s ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security
and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment – virtually
every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.
Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed,
as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to
oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.
The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine
and a timid, profit-obsessed “mainstream” corporate media. Meanwhile,
it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, “The children are
watching!”
Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.
Thus,
the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people.
But in addition to “A Better Deal,” they may want to consider adding to
their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs
who fund it.
It’s way past time to stop the now-routine
Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold
political power.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and author of over 25 books in print.
Tonight, Senator John McCain just paid red don back for his 'I like people who weren't captured' shit.
He was the third vote, with Senators Collins and Murkowski to kill the skinny bill.
I don't know what happens next.
---
All eight pages of the Trojan Horse "Health Care Freedom Act" have been published.
I could tell you what's in them, but the thing is, Senators don't
want this to become law. They don't want the House to rubber-stamp this.
This is just a placeholder to send over to the House so they can
convene a conference committee, which will surely fail.
And when it fails, this will pass. So I guess that means you should know what's in it.
Repeals individual mandate, effective January 1, 2017.
Allows some tinkering by states to Essential Health Benefits
Repeals device tax
Defunds Planned Parenthood
Raises limits to Health Savings Accounts
This bill will immediately increase premiums by 20 percent across the
whole marketplace -- not just individual but also employer markets. It
will also take away access for 16-17 million people.
I'm afraid (as are many of the health care experts I follow) that
this will pass. I will update this post with more as it's available.
(Reuters)
- One of two men convicted in the first of several trials stemming from
a 2014 standoff led by renegade rancher Cliven Bundy against federal
authorities in Nevada was sentenced on Wednesday to 68 years in prison
for his role in the armed confrontation.
Gregory
Burleson, 53, of Phoenix, was found guilty in April of eight felony
counts, including charges of threatening and assaulting federal
officers, obstruction of justice, interstate travel in aid of extortion
and firearms offenses related to a crime of violence.
The
uprising at Bundy's ranch near Bunkerville, Nevada, 75 miles (120 km)
northeast of Las Vegas, grew out of a dispute in which federal agents
seized Bundy's cattle over his refusal to pay fees required for grazing
his livestock on government land.
The standoff
became a flashpoint in long-simmering tensions over federal ownership of
vast tracts of public lands in the West, and a rallying point for
right-wing militants who challenge the U.S. government's authority in
the region.
Burleson was the first of 17
defendants from the Bundy revolt to be tried, convicted and sent to
prison. A co-defendant found guilty by the same jury faces sentencing in
September.
Four others granted a mistrial in
April are being retried in Nevada. Two more groups of defendants,
including Bundy and his sons, are scheduled to stand trial later this
year and next.
Two others charged in the case
pleaded guilty separately. One received a seven-year prison term, the
other will be sentenced in January, said Trisha Young, a spokeswoman for
the U.S. Attorney's Office in Las Vegas.
Two
of Bundy's sons and four followers were acquitted of conspiracy charges
in a separate trial in October stemming from their armed takeover of a
federal wildlife center in Oregon in early 2016.
Wednesday's sentencing came days before various militia groups plan a weekend rally near Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Burleson
and the five others with whom he was tried were described by
prosecutors as Bundy's "gunmen and followers," who showed up at his
ranch from neighboring Western states armed with assault rifles and
other weapons.
Prosecutors
said all six were among hundreds who descended on Bunkerville in April
2014 for a showdown with federal officers providing security during a
court-ordered roundup of Bundy's cattle.
Outgunned by Bundy's
supporters, authorities released the cattle and left the area. Although
no shots were fired, prosecutors said Burleson and his five
co-defendants aimed rifles at law enforcement.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker
I know there are people who are more responsible than Arizona Senator
John McCain for the passage of the motion to proceed to dismantle health
care coverage for millions of Americans and give a big ass tax cut to
the wealthiest in the country. I know that there is still a long, long
way to go before any actual legislation that does all that passes,
although it really just seems like a fait accompli at this point.
And I know, I know, Christ, fuck, I know that in some cosmic sense it's
wrong to attack someone who has an aggressive form of brain cancer and
just had a blood clot removed from behind his eyeball, that such
suffering ought to be given respect. But fuck all that.
Fuck you, John McCain, you petulant, pissant son of a bitch. Fuck you,
fuck your legacy, fuck your pain, fuck your recovery, fuck your family,
and fuck, fuck, fuck you. And I feel free to say that because, with his
vote today to allow debate on some bullshit new health care plan, he
said, "Fuck you" to hundreds of thousands of his state's constituents
who will lose Medicaid coverage or be priced out of insurance or be pushed into some worthless policy.
The saddest response to McCain's announcement yesterday that he was
returning early to Washington to vote on the motion-to-proceed was the
hope that the mythical maverick McCain would show up and, likely having
no more elections to run, would do the right thing by voting "No." That
McCain never existed, and, except for issues like torture, he has been
as loyal a Republican as any flea on the hairs on Mitch McConnell's waxy
balls. Of course he was coming back to dick people over. It's what he
does. He's a motherfucker, like every other Republican motherfucker.
Motherfuckers fuck mothers. How many times do I have to say this? They
fuck mothers. It's right there in the word. If they get a chance to fuck
a mother, they will fuck that mother because they are motherfuckers.
And the repeal of the Affordable Care Act is like a sticky blood orgy of
motherfuckery. By the time the process is over, Republicans will fuck
every hole and carve some new ones to fuck.
Not only did McCain vote, but then he saw fit to stand there
and give a sanctimonious goddamned speech decrying how the Senate has
become "more partisan, more tribal." He called for a return to some kind
of era of comity, and he blamed both parties for what he sees as a
breakdown in "regular order" in the Senate and the ability to work
together. And all over the media, people acted like fuckin' Lancelot had
just come riding in to save the day when it was really just a filthy
one-eyed poodle with a chip on its shoulder and ankles to bite.
Let's contextualize: "Regular order" was stabbed to death by Republicans
during the Obama presidency when the Senate GOP decided that every bill
would be filibustered when they were in the minority and any idea of
the President's would be blocked when they got the majority. John McCain
barely squeaked a single fart of protest out from between his saggy ass
cheeks. In fact, again, except for torture (sometimes), he went along
every single fucked up time that Republicans threw themselves in the way
of legislation passed by the House. And then he blew shit up like a
common terrorist when Republicans got the Senate back. "Regular order,"
motherfucker? Suck a pig dick.
Shit, in his little vomit of a speech
today, he smirked when he criticized Democrats for not engaging
Republicans on the Affordable Care Act: "The Obama administration and
congressional Democrats shouldn’t have forced through Congress without
any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as
Obamacare." Bitch, there were ten months of hearings and 160 Republican amendments got into the bill. So make a dildo out of your complaint about regular order and shove it up your worn out sphincter.
And let's contextualize further: What McCain voted for today was a
phantom bill. It was a sham to get something out there so that the
amendment process could start on the House bill. It was as far from
regular order as having monkeys fuck on the floor of the Senate,
although that's a fair analogy for what actually occurred.
The final fucking insult from McCain today was that he once again
pretended like he might be a maverick. He said, "Why don’t we try the
old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs
encourage us to act. If this process ends in failure, which seem likely,
then let’s return to regular order." If you think that McCain will do
anything noble, if you think he will put country over party or
compassion over ideology, then you have no idea who John McCain really
is: a shitty human being who tricked everyone into thinking he was
better than that, a false idol, and a sad, miserable fool who deserves
to be pissed on by everyone he passes. He had a chance to be a hero to
the vast majority of Americans today, but he didn't care. Not even after
receiving the government-paid health care he has gotten his entire
life. And he gives a win to Donald Trump, who mocked McCain being a POW
during the Vietnam War.
Fuck him.
Besides, he gave us Sarah Palin, whose stupidity, vapidity, and cruelty
arguably paved over the gravel road and made the ride easier for Donald
Trump.
Donald Trump, a man who wouldn't know honor if it bit his ass and
screamed, "I'm honor," gave a speech to the annual Boy Scout Jamboree.
During it, he unzipped his fly and pulled out his little dick, stretched
it until it was near ripping and said, "Check out that dick, boys. Not
bad. Not bad, if I say so myself. And you know I do." When he wasn't
shaking his dick at the children, he was making jokes like he was
starring in Hell's version of Catch a Rising Star, riffing and then
stepping away from the microphone and swinging his Yeti-like arms for
emphasis. It was like watching a brain-damaged ape trying to imitate
Rodney Dangerfield.
The next night, last night, Trump had another one of his Nuremberg
Rallies (yeah, I'm comparing him to Hitler - Do we have to wait until
he's gassing people to do that?), this time in Ohio. An asshole in
defeat, he is a throbbing, distended sphincter in victory. So he dropped
his pants in front of the gathered 6,000 people and said, "I'm gonna
make Democrats and Jeff Sessions and Lisa Murkowski kiss my fat ass!"
Well, not really. But it was two days of utter degradation, an
embarrassing display put on by our goddamned president. You've heard
some of the shitty things he said, but, believe me (as he would say),
there was line after line of shame and shamelessness and dickishness and
brazen fuckery. For instance,
- "I am thrilled to be here. Thrilled. And if you think that was an
easy trip, you’re wrong." Trump is acting like he personally hiked
through the mountains of West Virginia to get to the event when he was
brought there on a golden throne. Probably there was no golf cart go
from the holding area to the stage. But he wants the kids to be grateful
he made the effort.
- "By the way, what do you think the chances are that this incredible,
massive crowd, record-setting is going to be shown on television
tonight? One percent or zero?" Trump is obsessed with setting records.
He could just become a professional hot dog eater and call up Guinness,
but, no, he's gotta fuck with all of us.
- "I saw him at a cocktail party, and it was very sad because the
hottest people in New York were at this party." In the midst of a
rambling tale about William Leavitt, Trump dropped in that he went to a
cocktail party with the "hottest people." Because of course he did.
Because why would he waste his time with less than the hottest? Because
what the fuck else would you tell a bunch of children and teenagers
eager to race wooden block cars? A story about camping? He'd've had to
have fucking camped to do that.
- "Do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the
Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red,
it was unbelievable, and they didn't know what to say?" He told the
Scouts about his election victory. Because of course he did. He also
shit on Hillary Clinton. Because of course he did.
- "By the way, under the Trump administration, you’ll be saying, Merry
Christmas again when you go shopping. Believe me. Merry Christmas.
They've been downplaying that little, beautiful phrase. You're going to
be saying, merry Christmas again, folks." It's fucking July. It's.
Fucking. July. Anyone saying, "Merry Christmas" now is a fucking loser.
And then at his speech "Saluting American Heroes" in Ohio:
- "It's great to be back in Youngstown. It was an incredible time we
had. And you know the numbers, and you saw for many, many years
Democrats -- and they're really great -- but Democrats, they win in
Youngstown. But not this time." Election victory. Because of course.
- "Boy, he's a young one. He's going back home to mommy. Oh, is he in
trouble. He's in trouble. He's in trouble. And I'll bet his mommy voted
for us, right?" This was a reaction to a protester, bullying him and
deriding him for doing what Trump did for years on Twitter when Obama
was president.
- "We're gonna have it so that Americans can once again speak the
magnificent words of Alexander Hamilton, 'Here the people govern.'" This
was weirdly sandwiched between his proclamation that he was going to
bring back factory jobs and his assertion that only the "late, great"
Lincoln was more presidential than him. As usual, Trump gets history
wrong. Hamilton was talking about
Congress, especially that Congress was a check on the power of the
presidency. In other words, "Here, sir, the people govern: Here they act
by their immediate representatives" is a direct rebuke to Trump's
desire to run roughshod over Congress.
- "So they'll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others and they
slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go
through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals
that we've been protecting for so long." This was shortly after Trump
praised police brutality towards people arrested as gang members. It's fear-mongering in its purest, most sinister form, a kind of propaganda
that will get people worked up.
- "We will buy American and will hire, finally, American." Trump's own businesses are seeking visas to hire foreign workers. So, you know, fuck that lie.
At each of these occasions, the crowds, even most of the Scouts, cheered and chanted wildly.
This vertiginous ride we're on has gotten sickening. Trump has degraded
the language, the laws, the nation, and us, all of us. How far into the
dirt will he drag us before we finally either give up or fight back?
Donald Trump takes to Twitter and emphasizes that he has the "complete
power to pardon," drawing suspicion that his top advisers and even he himself might be facing criminal charges in connection to the
Russia scandal.
A stunning report in The New Republic alleges that, whether Donald Trump
knew it or not, for decades he made a large portion of his personal
fortune from Russian mobsters & oligarchs.
Joy Reid is joined by actor and author Ron Perlman, and Columbia
University professor of linguistics John McWhorter, on the bombshell
statements and run-on sentences from Donald Trump’s recent New York
Times interview.
Seventeen
years ago I gave John McCain’s Presidential campaign five bucks. It
was my first time donating to a political campaign, much less a
Republican one. But like a lot of people, I marveled at his backstory
of surviving years and years in Viet Cong captivity (I even read, like,
three pages of that big David Foster Wallace story about him), and—more
important—I eagerly took all his Straight Talk Express horseshit to
heart. Hey, that Republican is saying stuff about other Republicans! He seems like a real rebel!
Back
in 2000, McCain scratched that itch for anyone like me who enjoyed
pretending to be politically independent, and who happily latched onto
McCain as a talisman of that independence. You see, guys! I can vote for a Republican when it’s the RIGHT Republican!
And over the course of this century, McCain has dined out on his
reputation as The Good Conservative. He’s the senator who gives
thunderous copy to reporters, and does SNL, and issues bipartisan reports on the military giving the NFL promo money, and does the occasional cameo on Parks &Rec.
He fulfills every Brokawian wet dream certain members of the press
still have about politicians setting aside their differences and doing
the RIGHT THING, by God.
Today, Senate Republicans moved one step closer to dismantling Obamacare,
potentially leaving millions of people uninsured, jacking up their
premiums, and letting insurance companies cover only what they feel like
covering. John McCain voted for that bill because of course he did.
He has always been a big talker, but when it comes to the actual
meat-and-potatoes voting process, he falls in line.
He didn’t do the
right thing. He didn’t even come within 500 yards of doing the right
thing. For the past two decades, he has never done the right thing.
He’s a fraud. Alex Pareene had him nailed ages ago. In fact, it’s “nice” Republicans like McCain who provide cover for evil swine like Mitch McConnell, allowing them to gut the American security net and fuck over anyone who doesn’t live behind an iron gate.
But
that didn’t stop McCain from having the gall—the unmitigated, repulsive
GALL—to stand up in front of the Senate today and put on his Maverick
jammies and deliver a sermon bashing the very non-legislation that, only
minutes earlier, he had flown cross-country to help will into being:
This
is the part where I point out that McCain has brain cancer and is
likely dying. And while I wouldn’t wish brain cancer on my worst enemy,
McCain’s illness shouldn’t act as some magical shield that absolves him
from abetting—no wait, LEADING—a GOP whose appetite for brazen
monstrousness grows by the day. And yet, there were Senate Democrats
giving our man a standing O right after he gleefully fucked their
constituents, because Democrats would happily set aside differences with
Godzilla for the sake of gentility. There was scumbag opportunist Cory
Booker, hugging McCain and acting like this was some kind of
heartwarming meeting of the minds. And of course, there were the usual
political access merchants who were more than happy to line up and shine
McCain’s boots:
This
is vile. John McCain was never anyone’s white knight. This is the man
who ushered in the age of troll candidacies by tapping Sarah Palin as
his running mate. This is the man who caved to Donald Trump even after
Trump had the audacity to mock his time as a POW. This is the man who
called his own wife a cunt in public. This is a man who has spent all
this time acting as if all the Bad Republicans were forcing him to go
along with their nefarious deeds while voting in lockstep with them. He
is not a reluctant Republican. He’s a shitbag, same as the rest of them.
If you’re some Pollyanna offering your support to John McCain as he hollows out Medicaid, you’re a naïve dupe. As this guy said, The West Wing
wasn’t real. It was never real. The twin illusions of bipartisanship
and decorum have always provided handy cover for anyone looking to
willfully ignore the fiendish inequalities of the American political
infrastructure and the GOP’s rapturous thirst for cruelty; a thirst that
has only recently emerged in the foreground thanks to the existence of
President Trump.
"John McCain is the perfect American lie, a man who professes to be noble and fair and just while being none of those things."
I
was duped when I gave McCain my pitiable little sum all those years
ago, but I know better today. Everyone should know better. Everyone
should realize that John McCain is the perfect American lie, a man who
professes to be noble and fair and just while being none of those
things. He served his country honorably in combat, but in no other
fashion. And he serves out his time in the Senate, and here on planet
Earth, as a pathetic enabler. Never the lion; always the sheep. For
seventeen years, gullible people have been waiting for him to make his
face turn, to make some grand defiant move for the sake of God and
country. But that was always just clever branding on his part, and today
should serve as a cold slap in the face to anyone who still thought he
might have that kind of political courage left in him.
We know that Republicans have lied nonstop about the Affordable Care Act
ever since it was passed into law by a Democratic-led Congress and
signed by the Negro President.
We know that Republicans are stuck
because the ACA is mostly based on Massachusetts's Romneycare and both
come from plans from the conservative Heritage Foundation.
We know that
Republicans lied and continue to lie about the effects of the AHCA and
then the BCRA, the House and Senate versions of their "repeal and
replace" bills.
But there is one more thing, one more set of lies, that
is responsible for sticking a shiv into the GOP's dream of murdering a
bunch of poor people so rich people can be richer.
See, Republicans keep trying to put the blame for the fix they're in on
American voters. "We have to keep our promises to the American people,"
Republicans say. "We won the last three elections by promising to repeal
and replace Obamacare," they whine like a dog that caught a cat only to
realize it was a fucking mountain lion. Yeah, they're right. Voters did
put Republicans in power over the promise of getting rid of the
Obamacare horror and torture or whatever drama queen word you wanna use.
But, and this is important, they only wanted to get rid of it because
Republicans said they'd do better. Or, to put it another way, they lied
about what they could do for people if the Affordable Care Act was
overturned.
Senator after senator told you how you were enslaved by Obamacare and that the GOP would set you free. John McCain proclaimed,
"Families in Arizona and across the country should have the power to
make their own medical decisions – not Washington bureaucrats. This bill
puts patients and doctors back in charge of their health care by fully
repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a free-market approach that
strengthens the quality and accessibility of care." John Thune promised, "It’s time to repeal this law and replace it with something that works. And that’s precisely what we’re going to do."
Others got even more explicit. For instance, here's Wyoming Senator John
Barrasso (campaign slogan: "If you can't trust a man whose name
includes the phrase 'bare ass,' who can you trust?"), from a speech
he gave on the floor of the Senate in November, shortly after the
election: "First of all, nobody is talking about taking people off of
insurance without a replacement plan in place." Except that's exactly
what they talked about. While Republicans will constantly mention how
President Obama said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your
doctor" (which, to be fair, was an absurd promise), they simply aren't
owning that they got voters all excited about this new fantasy health
care plan where they wouldn't lose coverage despite repealing the very
law that gave them coverage.
In fact, when you get to what President Donald Trump said, Republicans were promising something amazing. Put aside that Trump repeatedly
said he wouldn't cut Medicaid and then, immediately after inauguration,
put out a plan to cut Medicaid. Trump and his people consistently promised that Americans would have better health insurance coverage, that all Americans would be covered, and that it would cost them less in premiums and deductibles. He literally said
this: "You will end up with great health care for a fraction of the
price." And he told Americans that we would have a "beautiful picture"
in the future of health care.
Republicans like to say that Democrats promise that they'll give people
"free stuff" and that people on government programs like Medicaid are
"moochers." But Republicans didn't win on the Obamacare issue because
people didn't want free stuff. They didn't win because they said they
would take away their health insurance. They won because they promised
people more free stuff and better free stuff.
In other words, they lied. But voters believed them. They wanted to mooch more.
And the vast majority of Americans realize now that it was a lie because
the Trumpcare plan that the Senate may vote to move forward tomorrow
does none of the things they promised other than get rid of the health
insurance they have now or make it worse and more expensive. So, of
course, now we get articles like "These Americans Hated the Health Law. Until the Idea of Repeal Sank In." In that New York Times
piece, Pennsylvania dumb shits who once thought Obamacare was the worst
thing since the theory of evolution say things like "I can’t even
remember why I opposed it" and "Everybody needs some sort of health
insurance." One stupid fuck went from opposing the law to "Now that
you’ve insured an additional 20 million people, you can’t just take the
insurance away from these people. It’s just not the right thing to do."
But we knew all along that people liked the Affordable Care Act. They
liked the elimination of spending caps and of pre-existing conditions
determining premiums. They liked keeping their kids on insurance until
age 26. And a shit-ton of people got to live because of the Medicaid
expansion. Yeah, the ACA was fine. What they hated was Obamacare, which
is exactly what Republicans wanted people to think of for a very simple
reason:
Most Republican voters don't hate the ACA. They hate that their white asses were saved by a black man.
They resented the shit out of that fact. It put a lie to all the racism
they've clung to for generations. The GOP used that racism for years.
Now that the black man is gone, though, they're totally fine with the
law and its benefits. They gave Republicans a chance to give them more
stuff, but they don't want their stuff taken away. Especially when that
"stuff" is the right to live a healthy life.
Be careful this week, dear dumb shits and dearer smart asses.
Republicans are going to keep coming after the Affordable Care Act, no
matter how many shivs you stick in it. Stay on the phones. Keep the
pressure up on the few Republican senators who can make the difference.
Don't let the liars win. It's life and death, motherfuckers, life and
death.
And once we finally put this beast down, let's turn our attention to single payer.
(Fun extra part of Barrasso's speech: "Democrats promised that they
would listen to other people’s ideas, and then they went behind a closed
door in an office back there, and they wrote the law ignoring all of
the suggestions by Republicans, and without any Republican support at
all. We’re not going to make that same mistake. We will be looking for
Democrats’ help, we will be looking for Democrats to work with. We will
be listening to Democrats’ ideas, and we will be working very hard to
win Democrat votes for any new law." Insert your own
rolling-with-laughter emoji here.)
The 38 year old had arrived in America seven years
before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet
Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North
Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself.
Bogatin wasn’t
hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as
“Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet
Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on
Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58 story edifice with gold plated fixtures and a
pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.”
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump’s plan to
eliminate dozens of federal agencies and programs has collapsed, as a
conservative Republican Congress refuses to go along.
Among the programs spared are
agencies promoting rural business development and the arts, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Community Development Block Grants
and the National Wildlife Refuge Fund. Those and many others are getting
money in bills approved by the GOP-run House appropriations committee.
The House plans to vote on spending bills throughout next week, and the
Senate is expected to consider spending plans shortly.
Trump unveiled his $4.1 trillion budget plan in March, pledging to “reduce the federal government to redefine its proper role and promote efficiency.”
But in the House, where all 435
members face voters next fall, budget legislation has far more money
than Trump had sought for a host of programs. The spending bill for
agriculture contains $4.64 billion beyond what Trump requested, an
increase of about 30 percent. For interior and the environment, the bump
was $4.3 billion or 16 percent. For transportation, housing and urban
development, the committee approved $8.6 billion, about 18 percent, more
than the budget request.
"There’s that old saying in
Washington that the president proposes and Congress disposes," said
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan
fiscal watchdog.
Indeed, after many House and Senate Republicans complained to Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney in hearings about the impact of some of Trump’s cuts, congressional budget-writers quickly made sure they don’t happen.
For example, instead of slashing the Appalachian Regional Commission,
the House Appropriations Committee last week approved $130 million for
the independent agency, created 52 years ago, that helps fund
infrastructure and job-training projects in Ohio, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and other Appalachian
states that Trump won in 2016.
Lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., vowed that doing away with the ARC wasn’t going to happen.
"I am very proud that the House
Appropriations Committee approved a bill that includes important funding
for the ARC, an organization that does a great deal of good in East
Tennessee and rural Appalachia," Roe said.
Even agencies and programs
conservative Republicans purport to dislike are avoiding the Capitol ax.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been on the list of
programs many conservatives and Republicans have wanted to defund since
Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., was House Speaker in the 1990's.
Trump wants it off the federal books, too, but House appropriators instead included $445 million for the agency.
The National Endowment for the Arts
and the National Endowment for the Humanities have also been favorite
conservative targets, and got a death sentence in Trump’s budget plan.
That didn’t stop the House Appropriations Committee from approving $145
million for each endowment last week with plenty of Republican help.
"Throughout this year, we’ve seen
some of the Republican members of that committee saying that they were
working hard to make sure that the NEA would be receiving significant
funding and certainly rejecting the administration’s termination
proposal," said Narric Rome, vice president for government affairs for
the Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group.
All this still enrages plenty of conservatives.
"The problem with the Republicans is
that so many of them aren’t team players," said Chris Edwards, director
of tax policies studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute and
editor of DownsizingGovernment.org. "They’re parochial or, with
appropriators, it’s just a single-minded devotion to increase spending
on the programs that they fund."
Edwards said he was stunned when
leading Republicans railed against Trump’s budget plan to eliminate the
Community Block Grant Development program, which allocates funds
initiatives from affordable housing to after school programs.
House appropriators approved $2.9 billion for CDBG, $100 million less than its Fiscal 2017 funding level.
"Appropriators and other Republican
congressmen, they love to give speeches about fiscal responsibility,
they love to complain how Obama was a big spender, but now’s the real
test," he said.
"Trump has given them the way forward here with some
reasonable cuts. Can they rise above their parochial interests and do
something that’s good for the overall budget here?."
Other budget-watchers note that the
real money issues aren’t even being addressed. Marc Goldwein, senior
vice president and senior policy director for the nonpartisan Committee
for a Responsible Federal Budget, said that even Trump’s cuts ignore the
fastest growing parts of the federal budget, entitlements like Social
Security and Medicare.
"To me, it just doesn’t seem to make
much sense to be focusing all our energy on cutting the slowest growing
part of the budget," he said.
Sadly, President Obama did not have the will to send them all to jail
where many of them deserve to be—to this day.
In 2010, after President
Obama helped to navigate our country out of the largest economic
disaster since the 1929 Wall Street crash, he held a televised Town
Hall. During it, a younger and equally craven Anthony Scaramucci got to
ask a question.
The question sounded something like “WAH WAH WAH WAH
WAH, my feelings!”
To which President Obama replied.
I think it'd be useful to go back and look at the speeches that
I've made, including a speech by the way I made back in 2007, on Wall
Street, before Lehmans had gone under. In which I warned about a
potential crisis if we didn't start reforming practices on Wall Street.
At the time I said exactly what you said, which is Wall Street and Main
Street are connected. We need a vibrant vital financial sector that is
investing in businesses investing in jobs investing in our people
providing consumers loans so they can buy products all that's
very important and we want that to thrive but we've got to do so in a
responsible way.
I have been amused over the last couple of years this sense of
somehow meet beating up on Wall Street. I think most folks on Main
Street feel like they got beat up on; and I'll be honestly there's a big
chunk of the country--hold on--I was like there's a big chunk of the
country that thinks that I have been too soft yet on Wall Street and
that's the majority—not the minority.
Now, what I've tried to do is just try to be practical. You know
I'm sure that at any given point over the last two years there have been
times where I have been frustrated, and I'll give you some examples—I
mean when I hear folks who say that somehow were being too tough on Wall
Street, but after a huge crisis the top 25 hedge fund managers took
home a billion dollars in income that year. A billion!
For what it’s worth, Scaramucci is exactly like the rest of this administration—pond scum moonlighting as human.
The moment Anthony Scaramucci presented his business card to President
Trump, the deal was a good as done. Sean Spicer was on his way out, with
Mr. Smooth installed as White House communications director.Scaramucci
checks all the boxes for Trump: Goldman Sachs background, ties to
Russia, Wall Street insider, enormous amounts of hair product, prepared
to say anything and most importantly, in love with himself and the
President. Truly a match made in heaven
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, during a briefing last month.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON
— Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday
morning, telling Trump he vehemently disagreed with the
appointment of the New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as
communications director.
Mr.
Trump offered Mr. Scaramucci the job at 10 A.M. Trump requested
that Mr. Spicer stay on, but Mr. Spicer told Mr. Trump that he believed
the appointment was a major mistake, according to a person with direct
knowledge of the exchange.
Donald Trump, clearly terrified over the direction of the Russia
investigation, is considering to use his pardon powers on himself, his
family members and his aides, according to a stunning new report in The Washington Post.
The Post reports that Trump has asked his advisers about his ability
to pardon himself or others, and another source said that the
president’s lawyers are also discussing the possibility of issuing
pardons.
The president is also reportedly trying to build a case against
Special Counsel Robert Mueller – the man running the wide-ranging
investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and Moscow’s
connections to the Trump campaign.
More from the eye-popping report:
Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways
to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia
investigation, building a case against what they allege are his
conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant
pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.
Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides,
family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according
to one of those people. A second person said Trump’s lawyers have been
discussing the president’s pardoning powers among themselves.
Trump’s legal team declined to comment on the issue. But one
adviser said the president has simply expressed a curiosity in
understanding the reach of his pardoning authority, as well as the
limits of Mueller’s investigation.
With the Russia investigation continuing to widen, Trump’s
lawyers are working to corral the probe and question the propriety of
the special counsel’s work. They are actively compiling a list of
Mueller’s alleged potential conflicts of interest, which they say could
serve as a way to stymie his work, according to several of Trump’s legal
advisers.
It’s hard to be shocked by any news about this president or the
increasingly explosive scandal surrounding his ties to Russia, but this
is a rather incredible development.
The news also comes a day after Trump threatened Mueller in an interview with The New York Times, telling the paper that if Mueller decides to investigate his family’s finances, then he will be crossing a “red line.”
Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to intimidate Mueller in hopes that he
will back off the Russia investigation, while now reportedly considering
whether to pardon himself and those close to him, suggests this is a man running scared.
Trump holds an audio interview with The New York Times and denigrates
his own Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the acting FBI Director Andrew
McCabe, and the special prosecutor investigating the Trump-Russia
connection Robert Mueller.
In a break with his boss, Thomas Bossert said Russian entities clearly tried to meddle in the 2016 race.
By Ali Watkins
07/20/2017 12:49 PM EDT
The hacking and subsequent release of stolen Democratic National Committee emails last year were “unacceptable efforts and behaviors by a foreign nation state,” Thomas Bossert said on Thursday. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
ASPEN, CO — Donald Trump’s chief counter-terrorism adviser said
Thursday that the Russian government clearly tried to manipulate the
2016 election, and declared that the Obama administration’s retaliatory
sanctions didn’t go far enough.
“There’s a pretty clear and easy answer to this and it’s 'yes,'”
Thomas Bossert said when asked whether the Russians worked to manipulate
the U.S. election — a widely held conclusion that his boss in the Oval
Office has repeatedly questioned.
The Obama White House’s response — kicking out 35 diplomats and
closing two Russian diplomatic facilities in December — “wasn’t adequate
in my mind,” Bossert, a top national security aide under former
President George W. Bush, added during a wide-ranging discussion at the
National Security Forum in Aspen.
Trump has repeatedly questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s
conclusion that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election with the intent of
helping Trump win. Trump said he pressed Russian President Vladimir
Putin on the issue during their recent meeting at the G-20 in Germany,
but the two sides offered different accounts, with Russia saying Trump
accepted Putin’s denials.
The hacking and subsequent release of stolen Democratic National
Committee emails last year were “unacceptable efforts and behaviors by a
foreign nation state,” Bossert said on Thursday. He stressed, though,
that there had been no manipulation of ballot counts.
The administration is not yet in a place to crack down harder on
Russia, Bossert said, but is exploring how to deter cyber-attacks.
There’s “no evidence,” he said, that offensive cyber operations deter
foreign hackers, so the White House is exploring more “draconian”
retaliations, like financial penalties.
Those cyber policies are in the works, he said, but their
implementation — including potential responses to aggressive cyber-attacks from countries like Russia — will take longer than most
would prefer.
“We’ll satisfy you, but we won’t satisfy you in enough time,” Bossert said.
The question of Russian interference in the 2016 election — including
whether any of Trump’s associates colluded with the Kremlin — has
clouded Trump’s presidency. Special counsel Robert Mueller and multiple
congressional committees are probing not only the issue of election
meddling, but other related issues — including whether Trump obstructed
justice by firing FBI Director James Comey.
Bossert touched on several other controversial topics, including
Syria, U.S. detention and interrogation policies, and the creation of a bio-defense force.
The administration continues to explore long-term detention
facilities for captured combatants overseas, including the use of the
Guantánamo Bay detention facility, Bossert said. Further, the White
House is keeping “all options open” when it comes to reopening notorious
black site secret prisons overseas, he said.
Bossert underscored the Trump administration’s commitment to Syria,
but said Syrian President Bashar Assad’s departure was not a top
priority. The White House has reportedly ended a covert program
dedicated to arming anti-Assad groups.
“It’s not important for us to say Assad must go first,” Bossert said,
but added, “The U.S. would still like to see Assad go at some point.”
The Trump adviser repeatedly chastised his interviewer, New York
Times national security reporter David Sanger, about his newspaper’s
coverage of classified U.S. programs. He also strongly objected to a
Times article that he said unfairly implied the U.S. has responsibility
for the effects of computer vulnerability exploitation programs designed
by the U.S. government which fall into foreign hands and are used for
malicious purposes.
Bossert also said the Trump administration would develop a
comprehensive plan to defend the nation against bio-terrorism, an issue
he said has been dangerously neglected, and which has taken on new
urgency because of rapidly advancing biotechnology that allows for the
creation of synthetic viruses.
Bossert said scientists may now be able to create a synthetic
smallpox virus without access to the only two known laboratory samples
of the deadly disease — a prospect he called terrifying.
The hacking and subsequent release of stolen Democratic National Committee emails last year were “unacceptable efforts and behaviors by a foreign nation state,” Thomas Bossert said on Thursday. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images